Liberal White Angst

[alixtii]

Now that IBARW has come to an end:

1. While breaking my Buffy character index into two parts, I added Caridad and Shannon to it. Adding one (more; there are CoC's already on the list) character of color to the index isn't a meaningful gesture in any way, especially considering the extreme periphereality of Caridad's roles in the stories in which she appears, but I'm glad I got to make at least a symbolic one. And I look forward to writing fic which includeds Caridad, Chao-Ahn, and/or other Slayers of color in more central roles--as well as finally taking on the question of Kennedy's nationality.

2. Rona is one of the few characters I actually dislike. I think most of the reasons are more classist than anything else, but I'm not so naive as to think there's not some subtle racism at work. I wish I could do something about it--but she consistently inspires in me the desire to spork my eyes out than seems similar to how some other people feel about Kennedy. (Kennedy was assertive because she knew what she was doing, having been trained since she was six; Rona was just clueless and whined a lot.)

3. Come the feminist utopia I'll be able to hate a character without worrying about the color of her skin. That said, I'll be a post-feminist in the post-patriarchy, and anyone who says "Maybe you just do hate her without it having anything to do with the color of her skin (or the cultural phenomenon which supervene)" automatically fails. Anyone who says that after saying "I don't think people can compartmentalize that way" during the incest discussions (I'm thinking of the older, pre-strikethrough discussions, mostly) really fails.

4. My use of "feminist utopia" in #3 to describe without racism betrays some of my ideological assumptions in the way I approach intersectionality. I still implicitly sort of treat other forms of injustice as symptoms of sexism/heterosexism, privileging gender issues over race issues, despite having received the memo that (so-called "third wave," and yes the term is problematic and erases portions of our history) feminists aren't supposed to do that anymore, but rather treat various forms of injustice as coequal (although presumably not all exactly as equal as each other?). I believe in interrelated systems of injustice and I call it patriarchy. The term I use for the response to and resistance against that system "feminism." I recognize the ways this usage is problematic, but my best alternatives--"injustice" and "justice"--are not, despite having a nice Augustinian flavor, as transparent to the ideological assumptions at work behind them.
 
5. Despite having performed a rather massive rotation of my user icons--all icons except for my Mesektet have been rotated out and replaced with a comics icon--still none of my six icon slots include a character of color. Now changing that would be a pretty easy fix--find a Martha or Tish icon (or, if I want to keep the comics theme I just adopted, a Dust one) somewhere and rotate it in--but that would of course be treating the symptom rather than the disease. (That's a bit too flip, I think; "patriarchy" is a self-perpetuating system. But I can't think of any tangible way that having a Tish Jones icon instead of a Kitty Pryde one will fight racism/patriarchy.)

6. That said, the way I find Tish Jones really hot really makes me feel better about the way I react to standards of beauty in regards to fictional characters (my standards wrt meatspace people tends to be less dependent on objective physical appearance). My standards will always have a racist component--there are few things I find more attractive than unblemished, creamy white skin (why do people get tans again?)--but I do seem to be responding to non-white characters in ways that I haven't noticed myself doing in the past. Perhaps the most important thing was just getting out of the Whedonverse--a large number of the texts (shows, movies, comic books) than I'm currently consuming have some pretty kick-ass characters of color, played by very attractive women. (And once I've gathered a few more data points, it's okay that Gina Torres doesn't do it for me, because there a different pattern elsewhere.)

7. If I get the feeling that I'm unintentionally playing anti-racism bingo in this post, it's probably because I am. So it goes. (Only thing to do is to keep on trying to do better.)

Comments

[frogfarm]

http://lolbuffy.blogspot.com/2007/08/sit-yr-white-ass-down.html

My high school crush on Oprah flares up again at the oddest moments, though I more consistently find Queen Latifah the bee's knees. And I could never figure the folks who didn't like Gunn because he "wasn't interesting" -- admittedly his Angel S5 arc wasn't as complex as I would have preferred, but I can't see him as a mere token foil. His interaction with Angel in "The Shroud of Rahmon", to pick the first one that occurs, is hilarious, dramatic, scary and insightful all at once, the way the Whedonverse was meant to be.

Doesn't matter whether I 'like' a character. Give me *good* characters, give me *interesting* ones, and I'll be there.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

It makes no sense at all to me for a fanfic writer to say a character "isn't interesting"--every character is interesting--but I can understand not liking a character. (This week's femslash_minis character is Cordelia, a character whom I don't really like, but there are plenty of interesting things upon which to hang a story!)

[shati.livejournal.com]

2. Heh -- Rona was my favorite Potential, because I found her attitude easiest to grok. I wouldn't suggest this if you hadn't said you wanted to do something about it, and you've probably already thought of it, but: rethinking scenes from a character's perspective usually helps me sympathize with them. (So does writing fic from their perspective.) Especially when I focus on what they know and don't know -- f'rex, we don't know that Rona even had a Watcher; she might still have been adjusting to the idea that vampires are real, and we have no idea what she was told about Buffy prior to showing up at the Summers house. (Considering Buffy's rep, there's a lot of possibilities . . .)

Of course this might not have worked for you with Rona, especially if she actives irritates you, but it helps me out a lot in general with characters I tend to unconsciously flag as "not relevant to my interests" and unintentionally ignore.

(And it helps me to remember that fandom really directs my attention, and to keep an eye on how. When I first watched Firefly I was totally crushing on Zoe and waiting for her episode, but since I rarely read Firefly fic and watch a lot of Firefly vids, I keep being reminded of Mal and River, and virtually never of Zoe, who doesn't have enough footage or enough of a personal arc to vid easily. If the people I read are constantly talking about and analyzing and writing about a character, they're going to take up more of my attention than characters who collect fandom dust, so I have to deliberately seek out reminders.)

I've been thinking along some related lines myself lately, so pardon the tl;dr. *g*

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Well, being the voice of pessimism, as Rona was, is a thankless job, I suppose, although I suppose she served a necessary function in season 7--one that might be a useful narrative function sometime in my own stories, I suppose. (Someone to stand up to Dawn sometime?)

Since I tend to focus on minor characters and generally disliked ones as a rule, I'm well familiar with the process. I think it's really my classism at work at least asmuch as my racism.

[pinkdormouse.livejournal.com]

there are few things I find more attractive than unblemished, creamy white skin

*shudder*

Not at the potentially racist component you mention, but at the class-based ideology that I think is also behind that ideal. Yes, one of my RL heroes growing up was black (and another was a woman of reduced stature -- go figure what that says about my brain), but more than that, a healthy, natural tan says to me that here is someone who works outside doing real manual labour (of the type I don't do so much of these days). When I grow old I want to look like a walnut, both in colour and in terms of wrinkles, though I suspect my connective tissue weirdnesses will prevent the latter as well as possibly reducing my ability to do more physical stuff the older I get.

Tans that come from just lying in the sun look subtly different to me to those that come from doing stuff outdoors day in and day out.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

*nods*

I also think my response to Rona is at least as much classist as it is racist, and more surfaceably so (the skin thing is just what makes me go "guh").

My gut-response is to find classism less viscerally troubling than racism. I'm not sure where that comes from, or what type of responses should be taking place.

[pinkdormouse.livejournal.com]

I think a proportion of your responses relate to US:UK differences. It's one of those things that's tricky to put into words though.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Hmm, apparently my first attempt to post did go through after all. Well, that's good, between the two I say things I forgot to say in one or the other alone.

I wouldn't be surprised if what you say is true.

My lack of interest in Supernatural is also subtly classist, I think. Making the two boys upper-middle class wouldn't be enough to get me to tune in every week or become massively fannish, and if it were about two sisters nothing could keep me away no matter what class they were, but...still.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

I agree there are probably classist implications, but what is fascinating (and disturbing) is just how insidious it would have to be. It's pretty clear how racism, which is primarily based on an objective physical characteristic and secondarily on intersecting factors, would shape my standards of beauty; classism's effect would be more subtle, especially as my taste for fairer skin seems to have been formed in opposition to the dominant meme (tanning) and intersects with certain values of geek pride (which is a classist pride I suppose).

It's strange how classism seems, I don't know, less bad somehow? Not that I trust that instinct, but it can be very persuasive.